Ink jet printers are quickly becoming a printer of choice for the rapid printing of a variety of documents. Such printers are particularly useful in printing images on a large scale basis. However, one type of document that has not been readily printed in this manner is the envelope. The reason is that a prepared envelope does not behave like a single sheet of paper in the automatic paper handling mechanism of the printer and thus cannot be fed into the printer using the automatic feed, or otherwise handled correctly. The problem is particularly acute in printers that use a rotating drum support and a vacuum holddown, as shown for example in U.S. Pat. No. 4,237,466, issued on Dec. 2, 1980. Because of the folded portions of the envelope forming the pocket, the envelope is too rigid to flex out of its preferred plane to conform to the circumference of the drum, even when using the vacuum hold-down.
The problem then, prior to this invention, was to construct an envelope that could be fed into and handled automatically on ink jet printers, particularly those that used a rotating drum support for the paper being printed. This problem has been aggravated by the necessity to have an envelope that otherwise has the appearance of an ordinary envelope. This appearance requirement occurs because of constraints of acceptable envelope aesthetics demanded by the end-user.